FAMILY RESEARCH REPORT	Journal of the Family Research Institute Founded 1982
"Hidden" Child Abuse			Vol. 15 No. 7 Nov 2000

At first glance, we live in a society that seems fixated on the welfare of children. Our politicians fall all over themselves to ‘protect children,’ justifying arcane laws as long as even ‘one child’ might be ‘saved.’ We have laws against child abuse that are so ‘sensitive,’ someone can violate them in some states by mere spanking. We mandate child safety seats in every car carrying children. Yet such mandates probably save only a few hundred lives a year, if that, since many kids are thereby trapped in burning cars.

Laws and regulations against carrying weapons to school — or even kissing a fellow student at school — have been passed and enforced. Our society is worried about children’s ‘privacy,’ their ‘sexual harassment,’ even a trace of pesticide on their apples. But while we ‘strain at gnats,’ we are definitely ‘swallowing a camel.’

Camel? Absolutely. There is no law on the books concerning what may be the greatest harm to the most children in our society. In fact, most people give it little or no thought. And politicians won’t touch the issue. For if we were to fixate on the largest harm, we would have to address the sexual activities of tens of millions of American citizens.

So what is our society ‘missing?’

Without a doubt, the greatest — and growing — harm to children is their being born illegitimately or having their parents divorce (both of these phenomena are, of course, related). Without a married mother and father guiding them, protecting them, and at times correcting them, all kinds of bad things happen to kids. They are often denied the many kinds of social support from concerned relatives for which government aid or social workers cannot compensate. They are denied the kinds of character-building experiences that only a married mother and father can provide. Indeed, for the fatherless, the penalties they endure begin with birth and never let up. And yet this great harm is unaddressed by the laws of our land.

Sex used to be heavily linked to marriage. In the 1960s, Frank Sinatra proclaimed without dispute: “love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage,”

But that was then.

A ‘revolt against marriage’ has been taking place over the past 150 years. Our children and society are paying the price. In the 1940s, only about 4% of babies were born to unwed mothers. It was a ‘scandal’ to have a child out of wedlock, and few did such a shameful thing. ‘Shotgun marriage’ — where the young lovers were forced to get married to ‘give the baby a name’ — was considered the better solution. By 1960, the proportion of births to unwed mothers had increased to about 5% — a significant proportionate increase of 25% in a generation. However, 95% of babies still were born in the context of marriage. By 1970, after protests against the Vietnam war and the onset of the “sexual revolution,” the proportion rose to 11%. By 1980, it was 18%. When 1990 rolled around the figure was 28% and for 1999 — the latest year for which information is available — the proportion was 33%.

Today, one of every three children born in the U.S. doesn’t have a father who is married to his mother. And the figure is worse for first births — 40% are currently born to unwed mothers. If you add in children who are fatherless (or motherless) because of divorce, the figure for teenagers easily surpasses 50%. And, since step-parents are generally ‘less than a perfect substitute for the natural parent,’ the amount of psychic and sociologic wounding of our children is even greater than it first appears.

For a society as supposedly rational and fixated on the ‘bottom line’ as our own, it is puzzling that the most obvious harm goes unaddressed. Study after study has concluded that children do much more poorly by all kinds of measures when they don’t have a legitimate father. The trend toward ever larger proportions of illegitimate children has no obvious societal benefits, except perhaps for those of a libertine bent who insist on having no sexual rules or limitations. The personal, financial, and social down sides are just too large.

We know that children do best when they are blood-relatives of both the mother and father in married homes. Of that there is no serious doubt and no credible counter-evidence. Marriage not only joins the mother and father, but it also joins their extended families — including grandparents, uncles and aunts. Everyone in the family has at least some interest in the well-being of a child born within a marriage. It’s a good thing to have a lot of people ‘rooting for you.’

Not surprisingly, given their favored status, children born within marriage are less apt to get seriously ill, less apt to die in childhood, more apt to do well in school, more apt to go to college, less apt to have mental problems, et cetera. They cost greater society less to properly socialize, because the family shoulders the bulk of that task. And they give back to society — children born in and raised in marriage are, on the whole, a good investment for society, since they are more likely to stay out of jail and become productive citizens.

Children born out-of -wedlock and raised outside marriage, or who experience a divorce between their parents, tell a different story. Although most of today’s young adults were born in marriage, those who weren’t comprise the large majority of those in prison. Not only is prison a very expensive housing arrangement, but inmates do virtually nothing worthwhile during their tenure. Furthermore, inmates have usually managed to ruin the lives and/or property of others on their way to jail.

Similarly, proportionately fewer illegitimate children attend college or get and hold-down good jobs, etc. And more of them end up in mental institutions. At the very least, in the aggregate, illegitimate children and those from broken homes are much more expensive for the community to raise, and live less productive lives in return.

As noted above, a growing slice of the problem is illegitimate births. Young women (and even older women) are having more and more babies out-of-wedlock. Undoubtedly, the vast majority of these women would claim to love their kids. But what kind of love is it when children without married fathers are less apt — by any standard of success — to succeed in life? Maybe it stems mostly from ignorance and unawareness of these facts. Yet belief in ‘freedom’ has come to mean that whatever one does sexually is OK, even the freedom to have sex outside of marriage simply for the purpose of having a baby.

The wrestling match is between the reality of what happens to children born and raised without a daddy, and the ‘right’ to ‘do what you want, when you want, sexually.’

U.S. Part of Western Trend

The U.S. is hardly alone in in the trend toward illegitimacy. The great bulk of the Western world is experiencing the same thing. As of 1998, 64% of the children born in Iceland, 54% of those born in Sweden, and 38% of children born in Great Britain were illegitimate.

In America, part of the explanation lies in demographic changes. Historically, blacks have had a very high rate of illegitimacy, but now Hispanics have joined them. As blacks and especially Hispanics increase their proportionate share of the general population, they are also increasing the national rate of illegitimacy. In fact, while fully 22% of births to whites in 1999 were illegitimate, a whopping 69% of black and 42% of Hispanic births were also.

Each of these racial groups has increased in its rate of illegitimacy, but the greatest proportionate increase has come from whites and Hispanics. In 1980, 9% of white births were illegitimate v 22% in 1999; 24% of Hispanic births in 1980 were illegitimate v 42% in 1999; and 56% of black births in 1980 were illegitimate v 69% in 1999. The white rate more than doubled during this time, the Hispanic rate almost doubled, and the black rate increased 23%. To paraphrase former Senator Patrick Moynihan, whites and Hispanics appear to be ‘deviating downward’ at a faster rate than blacks, though perhaps so because illegitimacy has so saturated the black subculture already.

Interestingly, a significant factor seems to be just living in America, being exposed to Western ideals as portrayed through our entertainment industry and educational institutions. With no exceptions, those of every ethnic group who were born in a country other than the U.S. but have moved here to have their babies have a lower rate of illegitimacy than those of their ethnicity who were born and raised in America. Overall, 11% of babies born to white women who were foreign-born v 23% of those babies born to women who were born and raised in the U.S. were illegitimate. For blacks the same pattern: 41% of babies born to foreign-born black mothers v 72% of those babies born to U.S.-born black mothers were illegitimate. For Hispanics, the same trend: 37% v 48%.

And the same difference turned up in Mexicans (35% v 46%), Puerto Ricans (55% v 62%), American Indians (31% v 61%)… even the Chinese (6% v 11%) and Filipinos (15% v 52%). Although Japanese living in Japan still have only about 1% of their babies out-of-wedlock, Japanese who move here have a 5% illegitimacy rate and Japanese who were born here have a 16% rate. So something is ‘going on in the West’ — something that has not infected the rest of the world to the same degree as here.

The ‘Anti-Marriage’ Sex Revolution

The first American revolution was about politics — who would rule. While it was successful, for a long time it affected very few people’s lives in a profound way. After all, the government was ‘far away in Washington DC’ rather than ‘very far away in London’ and federal laws seldom reached the ordinary lives of most people (even state laws were often not all that intrusive when travel was by horse or foot on rotten roads).

None of the American founding fathers was particularly concerned about ‘reforming sexuality.’ But once the dust from the political revolution settled, transport was made more rapid by trains, barges, and better roads, and especially after the civil war had established that property rights would no longer extend to other humans, more than a few sexual reformers appeared.

The U.S. was hardly alone in this development; a cultural revolution involving sex-rights and property-rights has been underway in the Western world for some time. That revolution has centered around whether sex should only be sanctioned within marriage and just what ‘private ownership’ of something means.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wanted to ‘reform’ both sex and property — Engels in particular, wanted to abolish Christian marriage and pointed to (rather shaky) anthropological evidence that various forms of group or serial marriage were once the norm. Engles also contended that women once ‘ruled the world’ because only maternity, not paternity, could be established under such schemes.

The Russian revolution, which imbibed of Marxian theories, had a profound impact on both the meaning of private ownership and what was legitimate sexuality. In the Russian revolution of 1917, the Christian notion that marriage meant a lifelong union between one man and one woman was at first discarded in favor of near absolute sexual freedom. But the Soviet dictators did not like the prospects for continuing and expanding their rule if sexual freedom continued, and the historic Christian notion of marriage was largely restored.

But where sexual freedom has not been taken to the ultimate extreme, the sex revolution continues, bubbling beneath the surface.

One of the scholars to document the changes in sexual mores in the U.S. was Pitirim Sorokin, a White Russian. He was head of the department of sociology at Harvard when he wrote The American Sex Revolution.

Writing in the early 1950s, Sorokin recounted the sexual changes in America since the civil war:

• In 1870 there was one divorce for every 34 marriages. By 1950 it was one for every 3. In 1890, “we had three divorces per 1000 married females; in 1946 17.6 per 1000. In 1867 we had 0.3 divorces per 1000 of our population; in 1947, 3.4. The supposedly sacred bond of marriage is now being broken several times more frequently than in preceding decades” (p. 8).
• The divorce trends Sorokin documented in 1956 have continued. Indeed, by 2000 there were as many divorces as marriages, and so many people were cohabiting and re-cohabiting that statistics on marriage and divorce had lost considerable meaning. Among whites, 50% of illegitimate births are to cohabiting couples. Among blacks the figure is 22%, and among Hispanics it is 53%.
• Sorokin noted what he termed the ‘voluntary suicide’ of the U.S. through sexual indulgence. This was the same pattern he had rigorously traced in numerous ruling families, dynasties, and societies from the beginnings of reliable recorded history. The rule as he saw it, was that as “freedom” to enjoy sex apart from marriage spread, the birth rate declined, and “once started, depopulation becomes difficult to stop” (p. 81). “Further disintegration manifests itself in the shrinking of the size of the family. The percentage of families with six or more members was 51.8 in 1790, 32.8 in 1900, 20.1 in 1930, and only 15.7 in 1940. The percentage of childless married couples has now reached between 15 and 20... in the childless marriage the family as a union of parents and children does not exist... These figures suggest that the candle of the American marriage and family is being burned at both ends — both as a union of husband and wife, and as a union of parents and children” (p. 9).
• Sorokin also presciently forecast that “An increase of divorce, desertion, and small families means an increase also of sexual promiscuity among more and more men and women” (p. 12). He noted that the proportion of illegitimate children had risen from 28 per 1000 live births in 1927 (i.e., 2.8%) to 39 in 1947. By 1999, 50 years after the latest statistic Sorokin quoted, the proportion of illegitimate children had risen 10 times — to 330/1000 live births. Only about 3% of families had just four or more children. As with divorce, the trends toward sexual social suicide that Sorokin indexed in 1956 have accelerated.

It has always been thought that sustainable societies have to produce a minimum level of goods and children. But America seems to experimenting with an alternative course: provide enough economic prosperity and freedom to attract sufficient numbers of immigrants to offset the slow suicide via sexual excess of the original U.S. population.

Unfortunately, the evidence noted above indicates that foreigners who settle here not only adopt democratic ideals, but also anti-marriage sentiments. Inevitably, their rates of illegitimacy grow compared to compatriots in their native lands. There may be no way to stop the trends toward illegitimacy and smaller and smaller family sizes no matter what the immigration pattern; all other factors seem overwhelmed by the lure of sexual freedom.

Why Are There So Many Illegitimate Kids?

In the last 60 years, after a ‘mini-marriage boom’ in the late 1940s through the early 1960s, both men and women started to wait longer before tying the knot. Part of this related to the emphasis on receiving a college education before marriage, and the dramatic rise in women attaining such degrees. Education and marriage don’t always complement one another — it takes money to do either. And parents in the 1960s were less likely to financially support a son or daughter at college if they were married and ‘on their own.’ In addition, the ‘sexual revolution’ theme had started to permeate both the media and academia. So many possible partners, so little time... particularly if you were ‘tied down’ to a marriage and family.

Abetting these trends was the rather sudden liberalization of divorce laws throughout the country beginning in the mid-1960s. Today, fully half of all marriages end in divorce. Over time, a slowly growing proportion of women either never got married or were divorced. In 1950, 17% of women aged 25-29 were unmarried. By 1975, 21% of those 25-29 were unmarried, and by 1998, 45% were unmarried. These are women in their ‘prime’ for sex and babies and motherhood. So while almost half of these women may not be married — either through singleness or divorce — the sex drive is still in high gear. And sex can and does lead to pregnancy.

Married women on average have more sex per unit of time than the unmarried. Further, they ‘play the field’ less frequently. But younger unmarried women are slowly catching up. Though in 1988 27% of unmarried women aged 20-29 hadn’t had sex in the previous year, by 1995 that figure was down to 23%. In 1988, 33% of unmarried women in their 20s reported sex ‘less than once a week in the last 3 months;’ by 1995, this figure was up to 37%. And 40% in both years reported having had sex ‘once a week or more in the last 3 months.’ So the unmarried appear to be having more sex as time goes on, resulting ultimately in more pregnancies.

While long-term pregnancy rates are increasing among the unmarried, induced abortions are getting less popular. From 1980 to 1995, a smaller fraction of pregnancies were electively aborted. In 1980, 10% of married women’s pregnancies ended in abortion. Fifteen years later the percentage of elective abortions was 8%, including 5% for married whites, 10% for married Hispanics, and 21% for married blacks. The change was even more dramatic — from 59% to 41% — for unmarried women, including 34% for unmarried Hispanics, 42% for unmarried whites, and 43% for unmarried blacks.

Countering this decline in abortion is the fact that unmarried women are using contraception. Only 12% of sexually active unmarried women now claim not to be using some form of contraception. Given recent declines in use of the pill and gains in use of condoms — which involve a greater risk of unintended pregnancy — the net effect of recent increased contraceptive use on pregnancy rates may be ‘a wash.’

However, the long-term effects upon the birth rate of delayed marriage and the desire to be single, sexually active, yet not ‘saddled down’ with kids, are sobering. Nearly one of every four unmarried women has had herself sterilized. Few of these sterilized women will ever have children no matter whether they end up getting married or not (reversing a tubal ligation, for instance, is dicey at best). And most will wind up getting married at some point, and many will change their minds and want children of their own. But they will undoubtedly contribute to the ever-declining birth rate among married couples.

Confirming Pitirim Sorokin’s predictions, views about family in marriage have changed. In the 1950s, the birth rate for married women aged 15-44 was about 150 per 1000 women. By the 1990s, having children had become so much less popular that the birth rate for married women averaged about 85. So in the space of just about 30 years — little more than a generation — having babies dropped by about half among married couples.

On the other hand, cohabitation (i.e., ‘shacking up’ or ‘living together’) has become fairly normative. And pregnancies happen today at almost the same rate outside of as within marriage. The pregnancy rate for unmarried women in 1995 was 95.8/1,000 as compared to 113.2 for the married. Many of these pregnancies among unmarried women end up being aborted, the unmarried abortion rate being more than four times the abortion rate among married women. However, as noted above, with recently dropping abortion rates — particularly among the unmarried — but pregnancy rates that have stayed the same or increased, more of the pregnancies of the unmarried are resulting in babies… illegitimate babies.

So even as the rate of births to married couples drops, a larger and larger share of all births are occurring to unmarried single or cohabiting women. While the conservative push to discourage abortion has apparently worked, it has resulted in considerably more bastard children — surely an unintended consequence.

References:
1. Ventura, SJ, Bachrach, CA Nonmarital childbearing in the United States, 1940-99. National Vital Statististics Reports, Oct 18, 2000 (revised).
2. Sorokin, P The American Sex Revolution. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1956.

Corner

Building a True Political Legacy: Encouraging Marriage

We have devoted this issue of Family Research Report to the single greatest social problem of our time. While FRI believes that the freedom being extending to homosexual activity is among the greatest public health threats, the greatest social problem of our time is the decline of marriage. Poverty, loneliness, boredom, sexual fulfillment, a sense of meaning — all of these are at least partially solved by marriage. Longevity and good health also accompany the institution. And marriage is ‘the place’ to have and raise kids.

Yet almost no one — including religious leaders — is bothering to confront this growing problem.

The almost single-minded thrust of conservatism — to stop abortions — seems to be partially working. But the price of being almost single-minded, and neglecting the importance of marriage to human well-being, is fairly high. And while it is obvious that most children are better off alive and illegitimate than dead through abortion, some sense of balance is being lost. The statistics are clear, women heading toward abortion clinics are disproportionately unmarried. Many lives of babies would be saved by more vigorously promoting marriage. Further, those babies whose lives were saved would be far better off, with much more hope in their future.

This election cycle has demonstrated a truth once again: the Democrats reward their constituencies in a way the Republicans seldom do. The Democrats are supported by homosexuals — and Democrats are foursquare in attempting to give special rights and privileges to gays. Likewise, the Democrats are supported by the unmarried, and the unmarried have rightly come to expect that Democrats will ‘deliver’ both laws protecting unmarried sex and economic ‘goodies’ to the unmarried with children.

If the Republicans would reward their most predictable constitutency — married people with children — it would help everybody. If, for instance, the married were given tax-breaks (not just ‘equality’ with the unmarried), many would desire to get married and ‘get the break.’ Similarly, if the married who had and raised their children in marriage were given even more tax-breaks and status-perks (such as preferential treatment in getting licenses, having special shorter lines in government offices or phone service, etc.), the ever increasing proportion of children being born to a bleak ‘life without daddy’ might be slowed or reversed.

If George W. Bush truly wants to help U.S. society (assuming he wins) he ought to focus on marriage. That is where he could help build a legacy that would have profoundly positive consequences for everyone.

Family Research Report critically examines empirical data on families, sexual social policy, AIDS, drug addiction, and homosexuality, digging behind the 'headlines' and breaking new scientific ground.

FRR is published 8 times/year by the Family Research Institute.

Dr. Paul Cameron, Publisher

Dr. Kirk Cameron, Editor

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